Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

Description

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music. Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP. Cover Halftitle Title Copyright Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: music, digitisation and mediation – for a planetary anthropology 2 Soundtracks in the silicon savannah: digital production, aesthetic entrepreneurship and the new recording industry in Nairobi, Kenya 3 ‘In the waiting room’: digitisation and post-neoliberalism in Buenos Aires’ independent music sector 4 Oral traditions in the aural public sphere: digital archiving of vernacular musics in North India 5 Online music consumption and the formalisation of informality: exchange, labour and sociality in two music platforms 6 Max, music software and the mutual mediation of aesthetics and digital technologies 7 Remediating modernism: on the digital ends of Montreal’s electroacoustic tradition 8 The dynamics of pluralism in contemporary digital art music 9 Music and intermediality after the internet: aesthetics, materialities and social forms 10 Postlude: musical-anthropological comparativism – across scales Index Back Cover